Monday, May 08, 2006

Here's a question for a Monday afternoon leading to a busy night of NHL action: What hockey writer — reporter or columnist — do you think produced the best work this season? Who was at the top of their game and who do you try to read on a daily, or near daily, basis?

An awful lot of time is spent on blogs complaining about the worst of the worst in sportswriting — I'm curious to hear who the on-line hockey minds like best.

18 Comments:

I'll take Scott Burnside on ESPN.com over anyone else these days. He talks more about what's going on behind the scenes and off of the ice than anyone else does and he does it well, without coming across as a snobbish insider.

I try not to rely too much on one voice. But Eric Duhatschek at the Globe and Mail is the best. Doesn't play favorites or grind axes. He's never provocative for its own sake and almost always provides a reasonable argument to back up his opinions.

Agreed with Jamie Fitzpatrick - the Hat is the best. Never ever see garbage from him that you see, for example, from Strachan. The Ducks could win 6 straight Cups and he still wouldn't give Burke any due.

I'll put in a controversial vote for Pierre Maguire. I know his personality grates on people, but if you get past that he is one of the hardest working, best informed guys on TV. He is one of the rare guys who can offer both insight on both the off-ice, player personnel stuff, and the technical aspect of the game on the ice.

Bob Mackenzie also gets a thumbs up from me simply because you know his "insider" stuff is legit, and he is willing to say, "I don't know" when he honestly doesn't know.

North of the border is Duhatschek. Fair and balanced, seems to know what story to cover and sometimes more importantly, what story not to cover.In the states, Scott Burnside has reached the top of my list. Great topics and his research effort on many of them pays off in the long run.

Ross McKeon of the SF Chronicle, Tim Panaccio of the Philadelphia Inquirer, and Chris Foster/Helene Elliott of the Los Angeles Times are the writers that have impressed me the most in the U.S. this season.

I think Duhatschek and Buccigross are the top guys. They both seem to take a lot of pride in, for lack of a better term, being right. Duhatschek just won't spout off conventional wisdom or easy narratives unless the numbers (i.e. reality) bear it out. His opinions, when offered, are marked clearly as being based on his own observations; he also seems to be one of the only sportswriters in the world who truly understands that games really are a "weighted coin-flip", to use Tyler's phrase.

And at the risk of contradicting the above, I also think Al Strachan is much better than the credit he gets. His primary virtue is that he's willing to state opinions that (A) are contrary to the consensus, and (B) he knows will be unpopular.

Another vote for Helene Elliott. Informative and well written, without the overwrought, purple prose and cliches that infest so much sports writing (in every sport, unfortunately). And I normally don't visit ESPN.com, but Scott Burnside is really good.

I'll second what matt said about Strachan. I hate seeing him on TV, hate reading his column and find him to be loathsome-his shots at lawyers irritate me to no end.

With that said, I think he's an honest guy. Something about the lockout didn't smell right to him and he asked questions about it. Unfortunately for him, it's tough for a guy like him to take on a smooth talking lawyer (damn them!) like Bettman and he got made to look bad-he doesn't really play the loaded question game that well.

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About Me

A sportswriter at The Globe and Mail, James covers the NHL and the game of hockey. He is a member of the Professional Hockey Writers' Association, a radio and TV analyst with TSN and was the NHL network manager at SB Nation from 2008 to 2010. A graduate of Thompson Rivers and Ryerson universities, James grew up in Kamloops, B.C. — one of Canada's great hockey cities — and was a season ticket holder in the Blazers' glory years.

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